Thomas Lecocq @ the Royal Observatory of Belgium

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Séismologie – Seismology

Imagine we want to plot a map of the seismic activity in NW-Europe and, at the same time, count the number events per month. To get a catalogue of earthquakes in the region, one can call the NEIC (note: this catalogue contains a lot of different stuff, i.e. quarry blasts, mining-induced events, army-directed WWI&II bombs…

Plotting focal mechanisms in Google Earth is an annoying task to do manually. I wrote a script to convert a text file to beach balls using the obspy package and then to create the corresponding KML file. Each ball is a symbol, used by one Placemark. Below, you’ll see a view of the beachball plot…

While in Indonesia last July, I created a small tool for the Kawah Ijen observers to allow them to search and plot teleseismic events and to calculate theoretical arrival times of the waves at the Ijen stations. It took roughly 2 hours to have a working version of the software, with: a GUI to plot…

Obspy is a really cool package for seismological observatories. In fact, it’s a super set of packages. They are distributed using eggs and have a nice way of declaring namespaces and entry points. The disadvantage, in my case, is that the namespace- approach is quite not compatible with py2exe (will maybe/surely change one day)… …